Member of Technical Staff: Hardware Reliability and Test
Walden Robotics · Cambridge, MA · 2 mo ago
Information TechnologyFull-time
About the role
We’re seeking a Reliability & Test Engineer to define and drive the reliability strategy for our robots from early design through production and field deployment. This role is ideal for a senior hands-on roboticist who is passionate about making reliability a first-class design principle, not a reactive failure response. You will work across mechanical, electrical, firmware, controls, manufacturing, and operations teams to identify risks early, implement diagnostic and validation strategies, and drive design improvements through strong feedback loops.
Responsibilities
- Own the reliability strategy, test roadmap, and reliability growth plan for robot hardware and integrated systems.
- Ensure reliability is built into subsystem and system-level designs from architecture and design review through production release.
- Define reliability requirements, metrics, test coverage, acceptance criteria, and release readiness standards.
- Design and implement diagnostic tests, stress tests, accelerated life tests, and validation procedures that expose real-world failure modes.
- Partner with firmware and controls teams to define telemetry, health signals, fault detection, and diagnostic infrastructure for monitoring degradation and failures.
- Lead failure analysis and build feedback loops from test results, field data, repairs, and failures into engineering and manufacturing design decisions.
Qualifications
Required
- 8+ years of experience in robotics, reliability engineering, test engineering, hardware validation, or complex electromechanical systems.
- Strong hands-on experience testing, debugging, and validating integrated mechanical, electrical, firmware, and controls-based systems.
- Demonstrated ability to define reliability strategy, metrics, validation plans, and design feedback loops for complex hardware products.
- Experience designing practical tests that uncover real-world failure modes and generate actionable engineering data.
- Experience working with sensors, actuators, power systems, embedded systems, logs, telemetry, diagnostics, or health monitoring tools.
- Strong systems thinking, failure analysis, technical leadership, communication, and cross-functional influence skills.
Preferred
- Experience with robotic systems, ideally humanoid or custom manipulation robots.
- Experience with HALT/HASS, accelerated life testing, environmental testing, FMEA, or reliability growth programs.
Benefits
- Competitive total compensation program, including salary, annual cash bonus, and company equity.
- Company-subsidized insurance programs.
- 401(k) with company match.
- Flexible PTO.
- Daily lunch.